Amazon ends sales of products with swastikas, burning crosses: report
Amazon has pulled items from its site featuring racist imagery like burning crosses and swastikas, a company executive said in a letter to a lawmaker this week.
BuzzFeed News reported that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) had sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos last month, questioning why the site was selling and profiting from some of the items featuring the racist symbols.
Amazon’s vice president of public policy Brian Huseman replied to Ellison in a letter dated July 31, telling the lawmaker that the site had removed the items cited in his original letter, according to the news site.
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“Amazon has reviewed the products and content referenced in your letter, and we have removed those listings, and permanently blocked the seller accounts found to be in violation of our policies,” Huseman wrote. “We have restricted the inventory to prevent it from being sold and are in the process of removing it from our fulfillment centers.”
The executive also said that Amazon does not allow the listing of items that amplify or celebrate hatred, violence or intolerance, or groups that hold those views, BuzzFeed News reported.
An Amazon spokesperson pushed back against the BuzzFeed News report in an email to The Hill, saying that the items cited by Ellison in his letter “were previously reviewed, and we removed those that violated our policies well before we received his letter.”
Ellison had written in his letter to Bezos last month that he was concerned that the site was allowing the items to be sold by hate groups, after a report by the Partnership for Working Families and the Action Center on Race and the Economy identified the listings.
Some of those items cited by Ellison included a baby onesie depicting a burning cross, a Confederate flag t-shirt and a car decal featuring a hangman’s noose, a reference to lynching.
A spokesperson for the lawmaker told BuzzFeed News last month that “Amazon selling Nazi propaganda just shows that the company has grown too big to effectively regulate itself.”
Updated Friday at 8:47 a.m.
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